| From the abstract: > This paper investigates cyber-physical attacks on avionics data buses, specifically focusing on the ARINC 429 protocol. The objective is to demonstrate how message injection, modification, and deletion attacks can be executed, enabling an attacker to gain full control over the transmitted data. I wish that vehicular systems all had air-gap level separation of messages, rendering it physically impossible to disrupt messages to critical systems like flight controls. I suppose that's a naive perspective, but in the long run it's hard to believe that we won't have to resort to provably correct systems to thwart attacks. > To accomplish this, we propose a method that involves modifying messages on the data bus without segmenting it. Can we really live with avionics platforms as a setting for the same kind of perpetual arms race against attackers that we have for general operating systems? |
Not to say that physical compromise of the wire is unbeatable; encryption makes it effectively impossible to spoof or rewrite messages, but the wires and communication protocol are already only intended for communication between trusted components (if you are communicating to untrusted components then you have to use something else like a data diode). The only really interesting part of the highlighted attack vector is that the "trusted wires" are likely not particularly physically separated from "non-trusted wires" or easy access which makes physical compromise at least plausible to achieve for a external malicious actor as compared to physically modifying one of the actual critical flight computers.